Kat Chow has always been attracted to stories of loss, especially from communities of color that investigate the impact of this loss across generations. She explored such stories (and many others) as a founding member of the Code Switch team, a project of NPR that investigates identity and culture.
Chow has also written about grief for The Cut and Lenny. Her debut book, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, which Alexander Chee calls “a daring, loving, searing debut,” is just the next manifestation of her journey to understand the intersections of grief, family, and identity.
In Seeing Ghosts, Chow and her family process the untimely death of her mother. The narrator Kat continues to see an apparition of her mother into adulthood and uses these appearances to explore the haunting nature of grief. The book also connects the loss of her mother to the traditions surrounding death and the larger role of loss in her Chinese and Chinese-American family.
We spoke
